Yallourn is limping back into service

We fielded several calls yesterday from a range of different people, so thought it would be useful to post this small piece to summarise how Yallourn seems to be gradually coming back online following the flooding that began in early June.

In the following chart from NEM-Review, which highlights a trend since 1st May until midnight this morning, we see that Yallourn would typically be running all four units hard but that the flooding event in June reduced it to the output of a single unit (with three units alternating to share this load).

As the time of the outage, we also saw prices lift in Victoria by something like $10/MWh – with the increase pre-dating the uplift due to carbon.

Trend of output from each of the four units at Yallourn (pre and post flood)

In recent days, we have seen that Yallourn has brought a second unit back into service.

It was flagged this morning in the media (e.g. the AFR here) that Yallourn would be returning to three units back to service.  However this also coincides with this article in the Age yesterday that describes how the amount of water held in the mine is increasing

As at the time of publication (approx 3:25pm) it appears (in ez2viewAustralia) that it’s still only the 2 units running at Yallourn:

2-screen display from ez2view shows Yallourn still at 2 units


This event does make one wonder what the price impact of Contract for Closure might be – keeping in mind that this would not be an “apples to apples” comparison in a number of ways.


About the Author

Paul McArdle
One of three founders of Global-Roam back in 2000, Paul has been CEO of the company since that time. As an author on WattClarity, Paul's focus has been to help make the electricity market more understandable.

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